Reese Witherspoon Inside the New InStyle: "I've Always Been a Little Spitfire"

Inside the May InStyle, acclaimed author Fannie Flagg sat down with Oscar-winning actress Reese Witherspoon for a candid conversation about movies, motherhood, and role models. What follows is an excerpt. To read the full feature, pick up the May InStyle, now available on newsstands and for digital download.

It’s a hot day in Hollywood, 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun is scorching a back lot of Universal Studios. It’s the New York set, blocks of gleaming glass buildings and elegant brownstones in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. It’s discombobulating.

But from behind a rack of clothes pops Reese Witherspoon, totally at ease. Her big blue eyes are clear, and she still has the peaches-and-cream complexion of a 16-year-old. She flashes the wide grin that has endeared her to audiences since she was a child. When she shakes my hand, her grip is firm but genteel.

Giampaolo Sgura

I grew up with girls like Witherspoon back in Alabama, where I’m from. Some of the characters from my novels, like Evelyn, the protagonist in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, speak with the same sweet, gentle Southern accent. And like Evelyn, beneath Witherspoon’s sunny charm, there’s a clever mind. She’s as smart as a whip. I think of her roles in Election and Legally Blonde, in which her characters’ bubbliness disguises razorsharp ambition. “I’ve always been a little spitfire,” Witherspoon tells me when we finally sit down over some cheese straws, a Southern treat I brought from home. “Sometimes it’s gotten me into trouble,” she adds. But that need to speak her mind has also given vibrancy to complicated roles in such films as last year’s hit Wild or in her famously nuanced portrait of June Carter Cash in 2005’s Walk the Line.

Today the 39-year-old Witherspoon is balancing motherhood, helming her own production company, Pacific Standard—she produced the noir thriller Gone Girl—and, of course, starring in her own films. Her newest is Hot Pursuit, out this month, a cops and robbers buddy flick co-starring Sofia Vergara. “Sofia and I got along so well, even our mothers get along,” she says, laughing. As we seek shade behind a fake city block, it’s easy to see why Witherspoon remains one of Hollywood’s most likable stars.

To read Fannie Flagg's full interview with Witherspoon, where she chats about her Southern roots and the women who inspire her, pick up the May issue of InStyle, now available on newsstands and for digital download.